OLD MAN'S BEARD

by H. R. Wakefield

  ‘All right,’ said his host, ‘give your gun to someone to carry back, and if you want tea or a drink, Jenkins will get it for you. There are some aspirins in my medicine chest if you want them. We’ll knock off in about another hour.’

  Mr Benchley was rather silent during dinner, and pleading a violent headache, went early to bed. He left for London the next morning.

  A month later the organising secretary of a certain society for protecting the interests of animals was going through his letters. Eventually he opened one, the contents of which seemed to cause him surprise. He got up and went to the next room, which was occupied by the publicity manager.

  ‘Dick,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a note here from a bloke named Benchley. I seem to have heard of him. Who is he?’

  ‘A famous Mass Murderer,’ replied the person addressed. ‘He’s put an end to nearly everything which flies, swims and runs, and in most cases in vast quantities. He once killed a thousand grouse in a day — or a million — some charming record or other — one of the five best shots in England, in every sense of the word — a Bloody Man, I imagine. What the devil does he want with us?’

  The publicity manager was a person of intolerant views and intemperate utterance.

  ‘He says he would like to see someone connected with this outfit,’ replied the secretary. ‘Let’s look him up in Who’s Who.’ He fetched that encyclopaedia of mediocrity and read out:

  ‘ “Benchley, Robert Aloysius. Born in 1870. Eldest son of (we’ll skip that). Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford. (He took a first in Greats, by Jove!) Founded firm of R.A. Benchley & Co., Limited. Recreations: shooting, fishing, golf. Address: 43 Brook Crescent W.1.” Well, he’s less verbose and full of himself than most of them.’

  ‘Does he mention how many grouse he once killed in a day?’ asked the manager. ‘ “Recreations: mangling birds, beasts, fishes and golf balls”. Imagine confessing to it! What he wants to bother with us for I cannot conceive, said the duchess. But go and see him.’

  The secretary thereupon rang up 43 Brook Crescent, and was told that Mr Benchley would be glad to see him at half-past three that afternoon.

  Precisely at that hour the secretary was shown into a large, quietly furnished, sedately appointed room, and Mr Benchley got up to greet him.

  ‘It’s very good of you to come,’ he said.

  The secretary found himself not quite at his ease. For one thing he was somewhat taken aback by Mr Benchley’s appearance. He had expected to find a hearty, rubicund, confident Mass Murderer; instead he saw before him a pale, soft-voiced neurasthenic. Well, perhaps not so bad as that, but he looked ill and strained about the eyes, and he had some nervous tricks — staring so hard at his boot — and then that occasional and discomforting sudden throwing up of his hands towards his head, a very noticeable and obviously involuntary trick, though he half controlled it.

  ‘I imagine,’ said Mr Benchley, ‘that you are very curious as to my reasons for asking you to come today. You probably know me, if you know me at all, as the incarnation of a kind of cruelty; that is badly phrased, but you know what I mean, a blood-sportsman, to adapt an epithet of Shaw’s. So I have been, but the past tense is appropriate, for I do not intend to merit that epithet ever again.’

  As he said this his hands once again jumped towards his head, were controlled and brought down again. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

  ‘Officially at least, we do not attack or concern ourselves with fishing, shooting or hunting,’ replied the secretary guardedly. ‘Many of our members shoot, fish and hunt.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Mr Benchley, staring fixedly at the toe of his shoe. ‘All the same I have fired my last shot and caught my last fish. I fired my last shot exactly a month ago. Do you have many cases of so sudden a conversion?’

  ‘I’ve known quite a few,’ answered the secretary. ‘In fact in a little way I am such a case myself; I shot when I was young and enjoyed it.’

  ‘Have you ever in a sense enjoyed anything more?’

  ‘In a limited sense, no.’

  ‘Then why did you give it up?’

  ‘Well,’ said the secretary, ‘I found that the memory of the movements and sounds made by the animals I had wounded remained with me. I used to dream of them. But besides that, I suppose I grew up sensitively as it were.’ He would have expanded this remark slightly if it had not been for the fact that Mr Benchley threw his hands up again, which distracted him.

  ‘I believe,’ said Mr Benchley, ‘that the sensitiveness to which you refer is an unchallengeable symptom of intellectual, and to some extent moral, superiority. Highly sensitive people are ahead of their time. A general quickening of sensitiveness in a race is equivalent to a general refinement of its civilisation. One day, it may be, to kill an animal for amusement will be considered an act of flagrant indecency, as serious an offence as wearing a white tie with a dinner jacket. As a matter of fact my conversion was not quite as abrupt as it seems. My father shot all his life, and I killed my first rabbit when I was twelve. It seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. But I can recall certain more or less short-lived premonitions that it wouldn’t always seem so natural. Every now and again I felt disgusted and uncertain, and these occasions became more and more frequent until that day a month ago. On that day I had certain experiences, experiences I had had before, but they suddenly seemed vile and harrowing, unendurable, intolerable. As a result of them I had a mild form of nervous breakdown. I have been in the doctor’s hands for the last month — I am better now, but not entirely cured, I’m afraid. It sounds an absurd question, but can you see any mark, any stain of any kind on the toe of my right shoe?’ He pushed it forward.

  The secretary made rather a business of deciding this point, for he was not feeling too comfortable. ‘None whatever,’ he replied with great emphasis, after a close scrutiny.

  ‘I thought not,’ replied Mr Benchley; ‘it is simply that I have been a little worried about my eyesight since that trouble a month ago. I quite realise,’ he continued, ‘that it would probably split your society from top to bottom if it attempted to tackle the shooting-hunting problem, and the money I am going to give it will be given unconditionally. At the same time I should prefer that some of it at least was expended in furthering the following causes. I will put all this in writing, of course.

  ‘Firstly: To put pressure on the Government to bring in a Bill making it compulsory for all drivers of horse vehicles to pass an examination in horse-mastership before they are allowed to drive.

  ‘Secondly: I should like a certain percentage of this money to be devoted to the discovery of a humane trap for rabbits.

  ‘Thirdly: To inquire temperately and impartially into the vivisection question.

  ‘Fourthly: To put pressure on the Government, by arousing public opinion, concerning the export overseas of old horses. Any money within reason you want for rest-homes for such horses will be forthcoming.

  ‘That will do for a start, and now I will give you a cheque.’ He went to his bureau and fetched it.

  When the secretary saw the figures his eyes grew wide and he began to utter fervent expressions of gratitude, to which Mr Benchley put, almost rudely, an immediate stop.

  When the secretary was out in the street again, he set off whistling and swinging his cane. ‘That old bird gave me the “willies” for some reason or other,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s something slightly “dunno-what” about him. Who cares! It’s his money we want! He seems extremely tame. I can imagine him allowing a really fierce snipe to bite his ear. Who cares! It’s his money we want!’

  After he had left, Mr Benchley opened and shut his right hand many times, and he did this to convince himself that he no longer had the sensation that he was gripping something warm and feathered which writhed slightly whenever his nails met his palm.

  A few days later his drawing-room was transformed into a highly efficient office, with a secretary and three plain but serviceable typists, all o
f whom were kept exceedingly busy. After they had been at it for three weeks the first-fruits of their labours were seen in the shape of a column-long letter to The Times signed by their employer. In this he had the cool nerve to suggest that, as a result of many years’ desultory, and a few weeks’ concentrated, examination of the subject, he had come to the conclusion that the utilitarian arguments for hunting and shooting were completely fallacious. He himself had shot all his life, though he had now given up doing so, but he realized he had shot simply and solely because he had found killing animals amusing; obeying a potent, savage impulse. Many people, he believed, salved their consciences when they inflicted gross pain on animals by reflecting that ‘someone had got to do it’. In his opinion no one had got to do it. And an elaborately documented argument followed.

  This bombshell started one of the most heated and copious controversies in the history of Press debate, for this discordant chatter spread from The Times and rippled out over the length and breadth of the British Isles, and wherever two or three were gathered together, the introduction of this tinder topic made for fiery dissension. Mr Benchley’s former friends shook compassionate fists in protest. ‘The poor old dotard! Incipient senile decay! Nervous breakdown! Blood pressure! Piffling sentimentality! Hopeless bunk!’ Such were the exclamatory refutations with which they repudiated such sloppy heresy. Yet he did not lack adherents, and the skirmish swirled into a battle, and the battle surged into a campaign. Mr Benchley’s post-bag was worthy of a film-star’s, though he had few requests for signed photographs; but every communication which deserved one received a courteous, if usually and necessarily a controversial, reply. He had always had the capacity to write concisely; now controlled passion lent him a style, so that his short contributions to sympathetic weekly papers were well worthy of their polished company. These little papers usually took the form of impressionist sketches of incidents he had witnessed during his sporting career; vignettes of animals’ terror and pain, very often. Sometimes they were dispassionate little studies of the psychology of those responsible for that terror and pain. One and all made a curious impression of authenticity, and many of great horror and distress.

  Throughout all this time Mr Benchley kept himself entirely aloof from his fellow-men. His former friends had no more wish to meet him than he had to meet them. And he was in no mood to make new friends. He worked ten hours a day, making up for much lost time. He left his business to his partner. The secretary dined with him once a week to report progress and plan schemes for the future. He became gradually acclimatised to his host’s eccentricities, for which he made St Vitus responsible. Mr Benchley still continued at intervals most fixedly and urgently to regard certain apparently blank spots on the wall or the tablecloth, and once in a while he flung his hands up to his head, but he no longer seemed so unnecessarily preoccupied with the toe of his shoe. St Vitus had yielded a point. He had observed correctly, the explanation being that Mr Benchley no longer was compelled to accept the fact that he could see a small splashed globe of blood on the toe of his shoe. This visual relief coincided with the patenting of an efficient humane rabbit trap and the initiation of a campaign to make its use compulsory. The bitter controversy started by Mr Benchley’s letters gradually died down as he had realised it would, but it left, nevertheless, certain permanent results, revealed, not so much by a perceptible but probably temporary decrease in the number of those who hunted and shot, as in a general intensification of that uncertainty and unease which had always troubled humane persons at the thought of at what expense they took their pleasure, a slight moving of the waters of sensitive perception. He was ahead of his time, but his teaching was not merely ridiculed. It was frantically assailed by some, its sincerity was grudgingly conceded by others, it was fervently welcomed as a potent aperient for the bowels of compassion by those who had long laboured in the same cause against apparently hopeless odds.

  It was on the day that The Times announced it could no longer extend the hospitality of its columns to the debate that Mr Benchley found himself most blessedly free from another ocular bother. That swollen, red blob which always reminded him so horribly of the pulped eye of a rabbit no longer imprinted itself on flat surfaces, and remained there, as it were staring aloofly at him. This, he had hoped subjective appearance, had been both frequent and regular, but like shell-fire its effect on his mind increased rather than diminished with repetition.

  The day after he was freed from this eccentricity, all the windows on the ground-floor of his house were broken by persons unknown, and some abusive phrases were painted on his front door, a gesture charitably attributed to medical students. This was quite probable, for the society’s inquiry into the pros and cons of vivisection had brought some uncomfortable facts to light, and it was generally known that Mr Benchley had been at the back of this inquest. He heard the succession of crashes just as he was reading a report from the secretary stating that, since the date when he had first interested himself in its affairs, the subscriptions and donations received by the society had increased four hundred per cent., that a grant of £10,000 had been made to the affiliated society in Spain, and that the long overdue fight against the torture of the Indian water buffalo was about to be begun with adequate financial support. Mr Benchley felt that those crashes rather appropriately signalled these announcements. A little later the society announced that a certain person, who desired to remain anonymous, had subscribed £5,000 to it to form the nucleus of a special Benchley Fund to be devoted to the further education of the public in regard to Blood Sports.

  The fund reached £20,000 in a week. On the last day of that week, Mr Benchley ceased to fling his hands up towards his ears at regular intervals, for he no longer felt that agonised scream suddenly shake on their drums. Nevertheless, he went to bed that night feeling utterly exhausted and ill. The next morning he couldn’t get up, and when the doctor came he diagnosed pulmonary pneumonia and engaged day and night nurses.

  Up to the crisis, Mr Benchley fought for his life, for he had much still to do, but he had undermined his powers of resistance by insensate overwork, and presently he knew he could fight no more. After that he relapsed into gradually lengthening periods of unconsciousness. When he realised he was dying he sent for the secretary, to whom he gave certain instructions regarding the use of the fortune he was leaving to the society. The secretary had come to regard Mr Benchley as a very great man, and when he had shaken hands with him, and said goodbye and left him, there were tears in his eyes as he swung his cane jauntily.

  The doctor came about four o’clock and made his examination. He took the nurse out from the sick-room with him, and shrugging his shoulders said, ‘There is nothing more to be done. He may last one hour or twelve.’

  ‘I’m wanted for another case tomorrow,’ said the nurse. ‘Will it be safe for me to accept it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he can’t possibly last through the night. He refuses to have any more oxygen. I can’t help respecting him, though I know he financed that damn-fool inquiry.’

  During his periods of unconsciousness Mr Benchley had dreams. In one of them he seemed to be watching a small excited boy who was staring across a surging field of corn over which a windhover was poised against the gale. And suddenly it lifted and soared over the bordering trees, a dark speck against the green, and disappeared. This dream recurred three times. And then he awoke full of a great weakness and a certain sense of peace. The nurse had gone out to pack her bag. The fire was alive but dying, just one still pregnant coal was thrusting forth lazy, lolling flames which slightly darkened the shadows. Mr Benchley was just about to surrender again to that overmastering weariness when it seemed to him that something leapt lightly on to the bed beside him, something which turned and faced him. And at first one of its eyes was clear, and the other bleeding and broken. With an effort he turned his head towards it, and then he saw that both its eyes were bright and whole again. And it nestled to his side. And after a little while something else fluttered up o
n to the blanket, something which for a moment trailed a wing and writhed, and then settled itself down beside him, trimly and stealthily. The flames died down, but there was just enough light left to enable Mr Benchley to catch the outline of something big and brown which dragged its hind legs towards him. Mr Benchley tried with all his might to get his hands to his ears, and he shut his eyes. But the silence was unbroken and he opened them again, and that big, brown shadow moved easily towards him and tucked itself down beside his arm. And then the fire shook itself slightly and the room was dark. And Mr Benchley, feeling three little pressures against him, rallied his failing strength, and just succeeded in moving his right hand over and down, and it closed over two long, soft ears, which twitched gently, as if with pleasure. And a moment later Mr Benchley fell asleep.

  ‘Look Up There!’

  WHY DID HE ALWAYS STARE UP? And why did he so worry Mr Packard by doing it? The latter had come to Brioni to read and to rest, and to take the bare minimum of notice of his fellow-men. Doctor’s orders! And here he was preoccupied, almost obsessed, by the garish idiosyncrasy of this tiny, hen-eyed fellow. He was not a taking specimen of humanity, for his forehead was high and receding, his nose beaked fantastically and the skin stretched so tightly across it that it seemed as if it might be ripped apart at any moment. Then, he had a long, thin-lipped mouth always slightly open, and a pointed beard which, like his hair, was fussy and unkempt. He was for ever in the company of a stalwart yokel — a south-country enlisted Guardsman to the life; a slow-moving, massive, red-faced plebeian who seemed a master of the desirable art of aphasia, for no word ever seemed to pass his lips. But, good heavens! how he ploughed and furrowed the menu!